


In Each Other's Shadows

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Percy Jackson RPF, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-18
Updated: 2013-04-18
Packaged: 2017-12-08 21:21:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/766152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Percy Jackson lurks around a movie set incognito and feels vaguely narcissistic about the whole thing. Meanwhile, Logan Lerman just tries to figure some stuff out: the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, including why the hell there's this kid in the crew that just won't <i>die.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	In Each Other's Shadows

**Author's Note:**

> Here's another piece I forgot to crosspost to here from [LJ.](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/91859.html) This was written before the first movie came out, so it bears absolutely no resemblance to reality, which is fine, because the movie bears absolutely no resemblance to the books, so we're good :D
> 
> Complies with the PJO canon only as far as The Last Olympian.
> 
> **DISCLAIMER** : 100% self-indulgent and completely ridiculous fiction. Last I checked, Logan Lerman was not dating a teenage half-god with behavioral problems. Although he's perfectly allowed to, if he wants.

:.:.:.:

 

There are three things you need to be a successful actor: 1) charisma, 2) a willingness to give into unrealistic body expectations, and 3) talent.

Number three is largely optional, but number one is paramount. All of them to some degree have the ability to charm people out of their socks and their firstborn children. They were the kids in high school who had no trouble making new friends. They can keep the thread of conversation going without seeming false or like they're trying too hard, they can remember names and the names that go with names, and generally they come off as very personable people. In short, they're the ones everyone else hated in high school and then covertly stalked when they get older. 

The thing about charisma is, you can turn it off at the end of the day, like a switch, like a snakeskin, shed and pooling on the ground at the final cut, and nobody's really quite sure who you're left with.

 

:.:.:.:

 

The first time Logan actually has a conversation with one of the crew is also the first time he sees someone almost die, which is awesome when it's completely fabricated by the CGI people and absolutely pants-shitting terrifying in real life.

It starts with them all pranking on Jake, which you have to admit has the potential for LOLs right there. It's Brandon's idea, and Logan's getting used to that even this early in filming, because the dude who's willing to parade around the set in lurid green skintight pants is going to be the dude who shamelessly likes annoying the heck out of everyone else for laughs. Anyway, he borrows the phones of literally _everyone_ on set, from the director to Logan to the grip who's adjusting the lights to the harried-looking girl with the headset to the old lady at the snack bar, and texts, _im right behind you ;)_ to Jake's number at ten-minute intervals. Everyone else just has to keep from falling all over themselves laughing every time Jake fishes his phone out from under his Greek armor and then whips around, scowling. It is, without a doubt, hilarious and completely immature and this is why Logan has the best job ever.

Finally, Chris gets fed up and tells him to put his phone _away_ somewhere, and while he's off set doing exactly that -- behind his back, Brandon snaps his fingers like, _oh, drat_ \-- one of the grips takes his place in order to reposition a light.

Which is when the set collapses.

The whole wall, same knock-your-eye-out green as Brandon's pants, just falls straight forward like a domino that's been bumped, and Logan knows for a fact those things are heavy -- learned it from the guy who plays his stepfather on-screen, who talks about stuff like that and somehow makes it interesting. It crushes two of the mounted lights on its way down, sending everything sparking and the sound it makes when it hits is what he imagines a giant's footstep would sound like, all _fe fi fo fum,_ and the ground _jumps_ beneath their feet.

It's a miracle the grip is unhurt: Logan knows it's a miracle, because he's the first one to reach him and tug him out of the nest of bent metal and broken glass that had been the light he was working with. There is a person-shaped _dent_ in that mess, but the kid doesn't even have a scratch on him.

"Holy shit how are you not dead," is what Logan gets out, all in one big rush.

The guy blinks up at him, and Logan has been an actor since he was eight years old and seen all kinds of amazing colored contacts, but this guy's takes the cake: brilliant and blue-green like the ocean off the coast, and then he ruins it by scrunching up his face up at Logan unattractively.

"Thank you, Prince Charming," he says, and sits up.

"Dude," Logan feels the need to point out, putting a hand on his shoulder with the half-formed idea that he should make him lie down again: that's what they do in movies, don't they? (This he thinks without a trace of irony.) "I don't know if you missed it, but the _set_ just collapsed on you."

"Yeah," says the dude, waving away the headset girl's inquisitive hand-gestures as to whether or not he needed her to call paramedics. "And now I'm probably going to have to stay late trying to get it all fixed again so you guys can have it for call tomorrow morning, so I really need to get up."

On any one of Logan's castmates, the remark would have been blithe, delivered with a thin enough sheen of sarcasm to make him grin, but on this guy, it just sounds obnoxious and a little put-upon.

"What's your name?" he finds himself asking.

He gets a bizarre look in response. "Nate," he says after a too-long pause, and then his voice gets abruptly defensive, "Nathaniel. It's my middle name."

Logan returns the bizarre look. "Okay. Do you go by your middle name, or do you have an actual name? Or do I just go around calling you something horrifically cliche, like 'Nate The Dude Who Almost Got Crushed By a Wall'?"

"Nate will do fine," the guy says, pained, accepting the offer of Logan's hand and hauling himself to his feet. "Tell you what, though. You make it to the end of this production without completely butchering your character, and I'll tell you my real name."

It's not the strangest proposition Logan's ever heard (that was eighth grade, with the girl with the butch haircut and the snake,) but it's up there. "All right," he goes, wondering how hard it would be to butcher Percy Jackson -- and kind of hoping this guy wasn't one of those canon-sticklers that took everything so _seriously._ "Fine. It'd better be good. Your name," he elaborates when the kid just looks at him strangely. "If I'm going through all that work for it."

 

:.:.:.:

 

The set is, in fact, fixed by the next day, and Logan thinks about the encounter only long enough to acknowledge this fact, before it's passed into some further recesses of his mind, and then the folks in costuming descend upon him, calling for the people from make-up, because the weather's nice enough to do one of the woods scenes today and they need to make him bloody and scraped up and why isn't he bloody yet, and Logan has no attention to spare for thinking about my-middle-name-is-Nathaniel.

Thing is, Logan's brain is very good at multitasking for him, and he thinks about it at odd moments. His train of thought gives him no warning before it derails -- this is the first time he's ever played a role that brings a book character to life, and it's a slow realization, that this character already has a legacy and he's just giving a face to it.

Percy's the most important part of this movie; Logan just plays second fiddle to that, and somewhere along the line, the both of them need to find a place to cohabitate underneath Logan's skin.

 

:.:.:.:

 

Okay, so, almost dying once is kind of cool, and it sure as hell will make for a great story to tell somebody, but almost dying twice? Now that's just being _stupid._

It's a Thursday, mid-afternoon, and technically, they're supposed to be filming, but they didn't do anything they meant to get done that morning, mainly because they kept on having to reshoot stuff; every scene, Pierce Brosnan misjudges how fast he's going in his wheelchair and has pretty much knocked over everything on set at least once, and Logan -- who can't think of him as anything except _Pierce Brosnan,_ seriously, he's got Moby's version of the James Bond theme on his iPod and he's constantly, like, ten feet away from a childhood hero figure -- keeps on slipping up and forgetting to call him Chiron, whoever the hell Chiron's supposed to be, because, dude, _Pierce Brosnan._

So anyway. They have this guy out there who's giving Pierce Brosnan (full first and last name; it seems sacrilegious to think anything else) a crash course in how to drive a wheelchair, and somehow it's devolved into them trying to see if he can pop a wheelie on it, and nothing productive is going to get done today at all, he can tell.

Grabbing a chair, Logan kind of sets up camp for the long haul -- his best friend sent him the sheet music for the cover he and the band have been meaning to do, so he has that spread out around him, different-colored highlighters at the ready. He's getting a little rusty on his guitar skills, and what's supposed to be him learning this song kind of winds up with him just sitting there, etching little Superman S's into the corners of the pages, demonstrating the full range of his artistic abilities.

So when Nathaniel/Nate/what the fuck ever walks by, Logan's head snaps up to follow him, a little starved for distraction.

Nate's not all that hard to watch, really. He might have the personality of a crotchety raccoon (or maybe he just saves that for Logan,) but there's an ease and confidence to the way he walks and moves around other people that Logan recognizes from years of acting classes. He's tall, dark-haired like Logan himself, and has the attention span of a two-year-old on crack, which _never_ gets old.

Taking no note of Logan, he beelines for the power box half-tucked behind the set wall. He's muttering to himself as he flips the door open, running his fingers over the switches and the --

There's a _crack_ of pure sound, and then -- and then --

It's like something straight out of Loony Tunes. Nate _lights up._ Literally _lights up,_ and Logan swears there's half-a-second where he can see Nate's skeleton, burning through his skin like an X-ray. His feet lift clean off the ground for one horrible moment before he collapses in an ungainly heap.

Logan has just enough time for it to really hit him: _holy shit I just saw someone get electrocuted._

And then all the lights black out.

The set plunges into darkness for one heartbeat, two, and they all blink around uselessly like they expect the darkness to clear out if they just flutter their eyelashes at it for awhile. Finally, someone goes, "Um. Were we expecting that?"

"Why, no, Mr. Bond," Pierce Brosnan replies coolly. "I expect you to die."

Just like that, the tension breaks, because actors have the innate ability to say the right thing at the exact right time.

It's crazy, Logan thinks, that nobody else seems to have seen what happened. Seriously, did no one else see that? Because his mind can't seem to get past it. _Electrocuted._

Suddenly remembering how, he pushes out of his chair, forgetting about the pack of highlighters he had in his lap and hearing them scatter across the floor. Stepping over them, he beelines for where he saw Nate light up like a Christmas tree, meeting stray furniture by way of his hips and shins. His mind is four steps ahead of his feet, imagining what he's going to say when he calls 911 ("dude, _no,_ I'm not kidding -- right in front of me! Like Wile E. Coyote!") and if this is something he might mention in an interview later down the road ("yeah, no, while we were filming _The Lightning Thief,_ we totally had a grip get electrocuted on set, how's that for irony.") and being distantly disgusted with himself for both those things.

One of the other grips thinks to prop the emergency "caution: alarm will sound" door open since there's no electricity for the alarm to even activate, and enough light floods in front outside that Logan can cast his eyes around the floor, everything smudged out in hazy grey. 

He's not entirely sure what he's looking for: do people actually turn into a pile of ashes when they get zapped, or will his body ... like, _smoke_ or something? Is he going to be extra-crispy, or is he just going to be ... _dead?_

He walks right into Nate.

"Woah," Nate goes, steadying them both. "Hi there. It's Logan, isn't it?"

Logan rears back. Stares. "What the hell," he offers.

"What," goes Nate, oblivious.

" _What."_

"What's wrong?"

"You just got --"

"What."

"I saw it!"

"No, you didn't."

Logan stares. "Yes, I did."

"Um," Nate blinks. Every single strand of hair on his head is sticking up straight.

"You -- you were like --" Logan makes some sparkly, twitchy movement with his hands, which makes sense to him at the time.

"Umm," Nate looks at him flat-out like he's an idiot, and Logan's really beginning to feel that way.

"-- like ... Wile E. Coyote," he trails off. He knows what he saw. Nate got _electrocuted_ right in front of his eyes, and here he is, standing there in bad lighting, his eyebrows arched at Logan like he's doing something particularly embarrassing, like drool.

Nate decides he isn't worth figuring out right at this moment. "Why are the lights off?" he frowns, edging around Logan casual as anything and peering out over the set. "Man, someone's going to have to go fix that. Nose goes!" he announces to no one in particular, immediately putting his finger to the tip of his nose.

And then he's gone, edging sideways down into a corridor, and Logan's left blinking at the spot where he just was and wondering what the hell just happened.

 

:.:.:.:

 

Persephone leads them down a set of shallow stone steps, and through a corridor -- which will be CGIed in later, because, "dude, no, have you ever tried to rig lighting in an actual dark, dank stone corridor and film your way around it?" grumbles Nate. "Trust me, we're all thankful we're green-screening this," -- her hair swinging low down her back and her boobs jiggling in her low-cut German barmaid's dress with every step she takes ("well, if we're going to make the Underworld anachronistic and really ... stony, we might as well make it interesting, right?") 

He's with them up until this point; he's Percy, vibrating with confusion and panic and disbelief and a dozen different things that a kid is supposed to feel after he's lost his mother to a manticore and been roped into an ancient Greek plot and then had to confront the Queen of the Underworld who just happened to have a very nice set of breasts on display and it's all kind of too much, and every single bit of that shows on his face -- up until they get to this point, and then there's this little click in his mind and he's Logan's again, holding a plastic shield and a foam sword and feeling kind of dumb and waiting for something to happen. 

Persephone's still talking, but he isn't really listening; her monologue goes on for awhile, and then Annabeth says something, and Grover makes a dirty joke about it, and then Persephone talks some more and Logan doesn't really have a line for awhile, so he can tune out. 

His next line comes some time after Hades intersects them in the low, dark stone corridor that doesn't exist, so he's waiting for that and it's only when the silence stretches on a couple beats that he lifts his head, blinks. He meets Alex's eyes -- her mouth twitches, her eyebrows going up; universal actor body language for _someone just fucked up._

Rosario realizes it's her line eight seconds too late, and then forgets it: her mouth opens and nothing comes out. Still walking, she begins to skip in slow, exaggerated movements, lifting one leg and slowly putting it down, and then she gives up entirely and goes, "And blah blah blah it sucks to be us, where's my goddamn Burger King? HONEY," she yells in the general offstage direction, towards where Hades is supposed to be coming in. "Why don't we have a Burger King down here, bitch? I'm sick of all this King Arthur stone castle and meat on a spit shit. Is anybody listening to me? HELLO." 

"CUT," Chris yells, and they all back up to the start of the scene, cracking up. 

"Shit," says Rosario to no one in particular. "What was that?" 

They try again, but this time, when Hades comes striding across the set and Logan mentally snaps back into Percy again, Hades takes one look at Rosario's face and then kind of just slumps sideways, laughing something about Burger King, and it sets everyone else off, and Chris goes, "WHAT THE HELL, YOU GUYS."

"You don't get to have it your way!" Rosario retorts, loudly, and this is _so_ going on the gag reel later. 

They head back for a third take, and Brandon says in his best sagely wizard voice, "Oh, but it is the true joy of this profession to watch all the other adults act like total morons."

Logan snorts, because someone from costuming is loosening the ties on Rosario's dress, letting her boobs fall into view just a little bit more, and Rosario's totally preening, because almost every single guy on set is watching.

Later, though, when they've all got their giggles under control and they're about to try again, Nate the magical electric-shock-absorbing grip stops messing with the prop positioning to sidle up beside Logan and say, "Why do you always have that dumbstruck look on your face?" 

It's a testament to how totally left-field this question is that what comes out of Logan's mouth is, mortifyingly, "I beg your pardon?"

Nate fiddles with the fake-straw stuff they use to light the torches -- he doesn't know if it has an actual name -- and doesn't call him on responding like a forty-year-old spinster. "During this scene, you always look like someone's hit you with a dead fish. You keep gaping at everything. Why?" 

"Um," blinks Logan, caught off guard because, seriously? Who asks this shit, outside of like, method acting coaches? "Because I do?" 

_Lame,_ says the quick glance Nate cuts at him. "It's -- dude, he thinks his mom is dead. Percy, I mean. He thinks his mom is dead and he thinks she's here, in the Underworld. So ... I dunno, a little more anger, a little more determination, less of the kindergartner on the first day of school, okay." 

Logan gives him the fish-eye, hand flexing around the strap of his shield -- for all that it's plastic, it gets really heavy after toting it around scene after scene. "You're really invested in this, aren't you?" 

Nate blinks, and there's this flash of _something_ in his eyes, something that's half-hurt and half-anger and Logan doesn't even know what to do with that, because Nate's going, "And you're not?" 

"Of course I am. It's just, where do you even get this stuff, man?" 

The strange look in Nate's eyes intensifies, his mouth quirked in quick, dry humor like Logan said something ironic, and his voice falls flat like a lie when he says, "It's in the books." 

Logan shrugs, turning away and tossing over his shoulder, "I haven't read the books, so I wouldn't know."

The expression on Nate's face is, without a doubt, the funniest thing Logan has seen, like, _ever._

 

:.:.:.:

 

Strangely enough, this actually does work as an icebreaker, and Logan takes to actively seeking Nate out, because really, it's totally worth it. It's like one of those unwritten laws that govern the universe, kind of like gravity and like Ashlee Simpson's boobs being the exception to gravity: if someone is easy to rile up, then you go out of your way to rile them up as much as possible.

Okay, yeah, Logan's not a dick 99% of the time, promise; more like whenever it's funny, which around Nate just happens to be 99% of the time. Besides, Logan is an L.A. kid, born and bred, and Nate is from Manhattan, and that right there is just, like, Montagues and Capulets, man; there's just no reconciling the differences.

"So, dude, if you're from, like, that island of indie wannabes over on the east coast, then what are you doing here?" Logan pokes at him, stealing the end of the bench he's sitting on. Around them, Chris and Lynn are trying to get the extras herded around for one of the museum-visit scenes. "Will the sun burn you up if you go outside?"

"What sun?" Nate goes without missing a beat. "This is L.A. All I see is smog."

Which, touche.

Neither of them are ever going to win the "whose city is better" debate, because while the set itself is in the Fox studios in Hollywood, a lot of the movie was filmed on location in New York, which evidently is where they picked Nate up, and so neither of them have much room to be elitist.

"But seriously," Logan says.

Nate heaves a sigh, tugging his headset down around his neck and pointing into the crowd. "See that kid?"

He tries to follow the direction of Nate's finger. "Yeah, okay, you're going to have to narrow that down."

"The one with the green scarf and the messenger bag. There, he just turned around. See him?"

"... the one with the unfortunate nose?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, yeah."

"I'm here because he and I went to summer camp together when we were younger."

Logan turns his head to give him his best _what the fuck?_ expression, which, actually, is kind of what he looks like by default around Nate. "So ... you went to the creepy kind of camp where, afterwards, you guys stalk each other in your chosen careers and, like, incestuously stick together when you go cross-country?"

"... actually, yes, that's a pretty accurate way to describe it. " Nate blinks at him, guileless. "What? We're a very close-knit kind of camp."

"Remind me never to check out summer camps in New York, then."

Nate flashes him a toothy grin. "Don't worry," he says as condescendingly as possible, all but patting him on the head. "You're not our type."

Another thing that Nate never fails to needle him about is the fact that he's taller, which is something guys like to lord over other guys by sheer default of having a Y chromosome. It wouldn't bother Logan so much if he wasn't, you know, a _full year older_ than Nate. ("Full year, my ass," Nate snorts. "Try more like three months." "Doesn't count if you're not there yet," is Logan's arch answer. "You're still just sixteen, so ha!")

Logan celebrated his seventeenth birthday in the earliest month of production, and as such, earned himself the unshakable reputation as the baby of the cast. 

His age had worked to his advantage during casting. "How often these days are teenage characters actually played by teenagers?" Rick Riordan had commented, somewhat rhetorically, when he first got the chance to meet him, shortly after the final draft of the script had gotten printed up. Riordan's a nice man, amiable and polite and full of good Southern values, and so Logan -- who spent his formative years growing up in Beverly Hills -- finds him completely weird.

His age helped him get the role, and then immediately started working against him on set; even Alex and Brandon, who are, arguably, his closest friends -- or at the very least, the castmates he spends the most time with, are at least ten years older than he is. They get a big kick out of reminding him, too; on his birthday, things like binkies and baby footies kept surreptitiously winding up in his bag.

So cut Logan some slack if he finds himself liking hanging out with someone his age, even if that someone has the people skills of roadkill.

 

:.:.:.:

 

When he gets to set the next day, Lynn's blocking the hallway to make-up because she's getting this blonde girl with a ponytail and visitor tags to sign the waiver saying she won't speak to anyone about what she saw here today under penalty of whatever movie-making company is producing this thing. The way Lynn's frowning about it, you'd think she's trying to get the girl to sign over her firstborn or something, but Logan has long since realized that Lynn keeps everything working and is entitled to that, "if you don't obey me you will be _shamed_ and _flogged_ and _left on the street"_ look.

"Excuse me," he goes, and they part obediently. The girl's eyes flick up when he passes, and widen slightly with recognition. He smiles at her, half-pausing to let her say her piece -- this part he's used to, with the fans -- but all that comes out of her is, "You smell like a _taxi cab."_

Which is ... not what he usually gets.

He sees her later, while they're still trying to get the extras herded around for the second attempt at the museum scene, and somehow it doesn't surprise him when she comes around the corner with Nate. Irreverent people attract irreverent people.

"-- come here just to scold me on coming out of two potentially fatal accidents without a scratch?" Nate is saying.

"Yes!" she answers smartly. "You should know better. It's like falling out of a tree and not breaking a bone. You are _retarded."_

"Fine. I'll work harder on getting injured next time."

She continues on, but Chris picks up his big horn then and starts _really_ yelling things, distracting him. Logan tunes in for a minute, picks up something about cats and Worchestershire sauce and something somebody's mother did in Spain and comes to the conclusion it isn't relevant to him and goes back to eavesdropping.

"No!" The girl folds her arms.

"Please?"

" _No._ You kelp head --" she drops her voice into a hiss, and Logan tries hard to look like he's not leaning sideways out of his chair to catch what she says. "-- I am not using my mother's cap to voyeur on your movie set. You're sick."

Suddenly down on his knees in front of her, Nate grabs hold of one of her hands and continues, "Please please please?" as earnestly as he can.

She looks at him in wonder. "You do realize that you're not going to learn anything by having me play spy, right? You're a nobody already." There's a beat, filled only with the sound of Nate _not_ changing his mind. She hits him with her free hand. "You are such a _git."_

"So you'll do it?"

"Will you call me if your testicles drop? -- Yes, _fine."_

He whoops and declares, "You are my _hero!"_ He kisses her hand, the back of her hand, her wrist, and then proceeds up her arm, and she hits him again before she falls against him, laughing long and bright and natural, and if people weren't staring at them before, they definitely are now, and Logan watches them and misses his best friends with a sudden, acute clarity, wherever in the world they were; misses being like that with somebody, unashamed and uncensored and not caring, just for a second, who's watching.

 

:.:.:.:

 

Logan likes the people in make-up. This, he thinks, comes from a childhood where -- after his mother and brother -- the faces in make-up were usually the first ones he saw in the morning. They're a special brand of folks, the ones who are always there at the crack of dawn, smelling of Columbian coffee and cosmetic paint, ready to sit you down in a chair and turn you into someone else entirely.

So it's while Logan is propped up in the chair in some zombie, zen-like state as Cassandra applies something that she swears to him for his masculinity's sake is not eyeliner, that he sees Nate go by, looking like he's been roughed up by half the city.

He jolts upright, but Cassandra flattens a hand on his shoulder, going, "Hey, no. I'm not done with you. You can pull on his pigtails later -- they're not going anywhere."

"I don't --!" he immediately protests, before he realizes exactly what he's doing, and clicks his jaw shut. She makes a noise in her throat like, _thought so,_ and he reevaluates his previous opinion.

When she finally lets him go, it takes him ten minutes to track Nate down -- he's in the canteen, straddling a chair backwards and half-bent over a sheath of official-looking forms. Logan's brief glimpse of him earlier had been accurate; his clothes are torn up like he'd gotten into an argument with a lawn mower and lost, but as far as he can tell, he isn't bleeding or otherwise on death's door, which is more than Logan expects him to be.

"What are you doing?" he asks, leaning against the back of the chair opposite him.

"Your mom," Nate's mouth goes, apparently without conscious direction from his brain.

"Ha! That's what she said," rejoins Logan, and there's a moment in which they just look at each other, and then quickly glance around to see if anyone else overheard their exchange.

"I'll pretend we didn't just say that if you do."

"Yeah, all right," Logan agrees readily. Being around this guy is obviously doing corrosive things to his repertoire of acceptable comebacks.

There's a beat or two of silence, and then Nate steeples his fingers together, peering down at the sheets of paper he has on the table. "I don't suppose you happen to have a pen on you, do you?"

Logan pats himself down, and finds one in the back pocket of his jeans. "Will this work?" he holds it out.

Nate looks at him like he's announced he's going to start murdering kittens. "Dude, that's your Riptide. I can't use that."

"Why not?" Logan clicks the pen, scribbles a little bit on his thumb to make sure the ink's working. "See? It works just fine as a regular old pen."

" _Dude."_

"Whatever, man, I don't even see why you're complaining -- you have a pen right there." He stretches out across the table, fingers catching on the ballpoint pen that had been hooked to the hem of Nate's boxers where they'd been peeking out of his jeans.

Nate edges away from the brief brush of his fingers against the skin of his lower back. "Woah, Logan, hey, bad touch," he complains, and makes a swipe for the pen back. "And that doesn't count. It's not a real pen."

"What is it, then?" It _looks_ like a real pen. 

Nate's mouth curves into a smile that's becoming familiar, the one that suggests he's enjoying a joke at Logan's expense and will lord it over him until the day he dies. "That's my Riptide."

"You're a freak," Logan decides, and gives the pen back. "And you're out of luck."

They lapse into silence, Nate rustling the papers back and forth uselessly and Logan just watching him. On the other side of the canteen, the breakfast ladies are playing some kind of card game that only seems to involve slapping the other's hand as loudly and painfully as possible, judging by the yelps that float across to them. 

"What?" goes Nate after a long pause. "You keep staring at me."

"You look like shit," Logan finally says, no point in beating around the bush. "What the hell happened to you."

"Nothing exciting, promise." he tugs self-consciously at where his collar's tearing loose from the fabric of his shirt. "I just had a bad run-in at the bus stop."

"With _what,_ Godzilla?"

"It was more like Mothra, actually."

Logan shakes his head in slow wonder. "Man, you just attract trouble wherever you go."

Nate ducks his head, hair flopping in his face, and shrugs with the kind of wide smile that makes his eyes crease into crescent moons, all, _aw shucks._

Nate has about as much charisma as most L.A. natives have common sense, which is to say, none at all, but somehow, Logan can't shake the feeling that he's acting, too -- that somehow, when filming's over and he coaxes Nate's real name out of him, that it will crack a mask and he'll finally be able to see the real person.

 

:.:.:.:

 

The third time Nate miraculously does not die, Logan isn't even there.

He's at a wedding -- one that he doesn't really know why he was invited to; just because Jessica Alba sucked chocolate sauce off his finger in a movie once does not BFFs make -- and he has to hear about it from Lynn. 

She walks into the canteen where Logan has the spine of Catcher in the Rye cracked so he can leave it open and eat his cereal at the same time, and says without preamble, "Your friend got hit by a bus last week."

Logan drops the plastic spoon back into his cereal hard enough that it splashes little droplets of milk everywhere. " _What?"_ he goes, even though he knows exactly who she has to be talking about. There's only one person he knows who would get hit by a bus and then have people talking about it in a vaguely dry, unimpressed voice like Lynn is. He wipes at his book, leaving damp spots behind on the page. "Is he all right?"

"Doesn't even have a scratch on him," Lynn shakes her head. "He stepped right out into the street and that thing hit him like something right off of Jesus Christ Superstar. Happened right in front of me and, like, half the cast."

"Figures," Logan says, and pushes himself to his feet. His armor creaks with him and he grabs his tray. "Where is he?"

"How should I know?" Lynn goes, almost tetchy, but don't let it fool you. On set, Lynn is God. She knows everything. Even Chris bows to her wisdom on occasion, and everyone knows Chris Columbus has an ego roughly the size of West Virginia. Sure enough, Lynn gestures over her shoulder, her bangles catching in the fluorescent light. "On set. Didn't even take a day off."

"Of course not," he goes, and maybe his voice is a little too fond, because Lynn gives him a knowing smile when he tucks his book underneath his breastplate and takes his tray to the return window.

Nate looks surprised to see him. 

"You haven't been around in awhile," he comments, and Logan widens his eyes at him, like, _duh._ "Where have you been?"

"Jessica Alba got hitched. She asked me to come stand around and look pretty, and hell, I never turn that down," Logan buffs his nails on what would be his lapels, were he not wearing Greek armor. "Meanwhile, I hear you got hit by a bus. Man, are you ever going to do us all a favor and just _die_ one of these times? Give us a break from all the near-death experiences. It gets old." Seriously, one of these days, Nate was _actually_ going to get hurt, and everyone was just going to be like, _oh, it's just Nate. He always does that._

Lifting his shoulder in a shrug, Nate tries to look modest. "I'm kind of indestructible, I guess."

Belatedly, Logan notices another one of the black-shirted grips with a headset is waiting for Nate to finish packing up a case of what looked like large metal tubes, and remembers that oh, hey, Nate's supposed to be working. It's easy to forget, with how easily Nate gets distracted.

He waits until Nate's finished sticking all the tubes into their proper foam shapes before he asks, "What's the weirdest thing you ever survived?"

"What, you mean besides the set falling on me, being electrocuted, and getting hit by a bus?"

"Ha!" Logan points at him, triumphant. "So you do admit to the electrocuting thing!"

Nate rolls his eyes. "Yes, Logan," he says patiently. "You did, in fact, see me stick my finger in a light socket. Congratulations."

Logan throws up his arms like he's announcing a touchdown, suddenly feeling very justified in himself.

He forgets he even asked the question, until Nate suddenly goes, "Hey, you remember, like, back a year or so, when Mt. Saint Helens had that mini-explosion thing?"

"Yeah," Logan nods. He hadn't been there: he and his brother and his best friend had been in London at the time, but he remembers, later, reading some political activist's Twitter about how that was the beginning of the end; the first in that series of natural disasters that struck all year. He remembers hearing about the tornadoes ravaging the Midwest on the transatlantic flight. Then it clicks. "Woah, hey, you aren't saying -- were you close by when that happened?"

Nate gets that look he does sometimes, that look that makes Logan think he's slipping out of character. "Close. Yeah. Yeah, you could say that."

 

:.:.:.:

 

The problem with filming things based on convenience of set and props and weather, means that most everything gets filmed out of order, so Percy hasn't even met Luke yet, and he's here, on his knees begging the lightning thief to give it up, to come back, because his life is worth more than revenge.

This is what separates Percy from heroes, Logan thinks; a hero, upon finding the villain, would fight him fair and square, armed and facing him, and he would shoot his nemesis between the eyes after getting the upper hand, no matter whether or not the villain was wearing the face of a friend, and the hero would live with that image for the rest of his life, bear it because he's a hero and getting other people killed is what he does. But Percy's just a kid, a kid whose role model is defeated and snarling like a junkyard dog underneath him, and he forgets his mother, he forgets the gods, he forgets everything but the thought that he has to save Luke, he has to, no matter what it takes.

At least, that's what he's trying to do, his hands pressing Luke back into the concrete; tries to deliver his whole dialogue with deep sincerity, deep feeling, but Jake's mouth keeps on twisting into suspicious shapes too close to a grin, and it's distracting. Logan grins, and then Jake's grinning because he's grinning, and Percy's speech trips and falters and Logan hisses too low for the mics to pick up, "you fucker, stop laughing."

" _You_ stop laughing," Jake retorts, and then, like he can't help himself, "I'm sorry, this is so fucking gay."

And Logan has to concede the point, because, dude, he's got Jake on his back and he's straddling his lap, Jake's hips a strange, sharp angle against the insides of his thighs, and so he says, "Excuse me? What show are you coming from? How do you get to call anything gay."

He mostly mouths this, and Jake widens his eyes in faux innocence, but his grin strains against the corners of his mouth, and someone offstage snickers, well-timed.

And what the hell, the scene's ruined already, so Logan leans down, rubbing his nose into Jake's cheek with great exaggeration. He manages one good grind in before Jake grabs his face and flings him sideways with a sputtering, "get off me, you freak," and they loll around on the cement, heaving with laughter and listening to Chris complain that he should have just stuck with the damn kids from Harry Potter.

Logan looks over as Jake rolls to his knees, his face creased into a grin as he offers Logan a hand up. "Come on. Guess what, you get to slam me to the ground one more time."

"Oh boy!" Logan replies, chipper, as they use each other's weight to haul the other to their feet. Jake claps him on the shoulder, and for a second, Logan looks at him and wonders out of nowhere, _Did Percy have a crush on you?_

"Do you think Percy had a crush on Luke?" he asks Nate later, watching him roll up a long, black cable.

Nate stops dead and looks at him like he's grown two heads. " _What?"_

"I think he did. Maybe he didn't, I don't know, I haven't read the books, but since I think we're kind of murdering the plot of the books in cold blood anyway, maybe that's something different, too."

Nate flushes dark and rebellious at the implication, and Logan knows exactly how he's going to play the scene where Percy meets Luke for the first time.

 

:.:.:.:

 

The day Logan figures it out, it strikes him apropos of nothing, just lands in his brain with the certainty of absolute fact, like suddenly remembering the dates of an important war or knowing exactly where you had to have left your iPod, smack dab in the middle of thinking of something else entirely.

Nate-my-middle-name-is-Nathaniel is gay.

_Wham!_ It's right there in front of him, and he blinks a little bit and then he's over it, because duh, that took him awhile.

Okay, well, maybe not _gay,_ because you can't really make those kinds of snap judgments about people (although who are we kidding, we all do it,) but at the very least, Logan can say Nate is immune to girls.

This stems from the situation a couple days ago, when Logan got to the set to find Nate stuck in the middle of a bunch of Aphrodite campers, trying to get their shields organized and accounted for. And despite having one of these girls on, like, _every side_ of him, Nate doesn't even blink. 

The Aphrodite girls are all bombshells, a whole mix of bottle blonde and Asian and ebony black, who are all cheaper by the dozen here in L.A. Please refer back to the three things needed to be an actor: the giving into unrealistic body expectations is, in fact, the easiest part.

Don't get him wrong, Logan thinks girls are _amazing._ The drop-dead gorgeous ones might be everywhere in Hollywood, but that doesn't mean he doesn't know that they're the exception, that more likely than not, the girl you're going to fall for will look less like a supermodel and more like your dad, and it'll be fine because she's fantastic and everything you want, and the girls who look like Barbies will always be there on television, being awesome and famous independently of you. He's not looking for one of those -- his first girlfriend, Emily, who'd gone to grade school with him and dumped glue in his desk once after he stole her collection of gel pens, had been more on the pudgy side than not, and had a trail of soft, dark hair underneath her belly button and at the corners of her mouth, and to this day, he doesn't think of any of those things were faults. And he doesn't get a prize for that, whatever L.A. tries to say.

It might be an actor thing, maybe, to be more attracted to the real, the solid, rather than the smoke and the mirrors.

But he does know this: if you ever do get one of those girls, one of the ones like the Aphrodite campers, who are perfect in every way -- if you ever do meet a girl like that in real life, then, boy, you better get down on your knees and thank her for the chance to get to see her, because she has worked her ass off and sacrificed endlessly to be able to afford that body, gone to lengths you won't even begin to comprehend, and you'd better worship every inch of it.

And that's as far as he gets with that line of thought.

"Hey!" Brandon's fist shoves at his shoulder, tilting him sideways a bit. "Dude."

Logan blinks, abruptly coming back to the scene at hand and the line he totally just forgot to deliver. "Shit. Sorry!" he goes, holding up his hands innocently as filming cuts and everybody drops character. "I just had an epiphany. Won't happen again, promise."

They start the take over again, and unbidden, Logan's eyes find Nate in the shadowy mess off-set: he's stretching up on tiptoe to tug one of the lights into position, head thrown back to check with the guy operating cameras, the whole long line of his throat exposed. Logan traces the trail of muscle, down to the slice of skin showing above the hem of Nate's pants, and the memory is sharp, sudden, and overwhelming in its tactile intensity; once, a long time ago, when his band was less of a band and more a bunch of kids hoping the ability to play music would show up eventually, there was this boy Logan thought was going to be his bass guitarist, someone to stand back-to-back with on stage. He was all loose lines and forever tracts of skin and an endless supply of witty comebacks that had Logan constantly wanting to talk to him just to see what he'd say. And he'd thought -- well, he really wasn't sure how much he was thinking, but he'd been so certain that he'd been looking back, looks that went on longer than usual and pauses that weren't awkward so much as they were _heavy_ but when he reached out, one night, maybe a little bit drunk and more than a little dizzy, touched his fingers to the sharp jut of hip, questioning and shaking eager, the boy had grabbed his wrist and gone, _hey, hey, Logan, man, no._

And Logan had jerked his hand back, mortification turning him to petrified stone, and gone, _sorry, sorry, shit, I thought --_

And that had been that. Logan hadn't thought about that encounter in _years,_ but it is flaring bright in his senses now, his fingertips tingling like there is skin right underneath them.

He knows he's not reading things wrong this time.

 

:.:.:.:

 

The Avatar premiere goes great, as far as premieres go. Only one person throws up and faints, and it's nobody they know, so it stays out of their press. Nobody wears anything highbrow or outlandish, and they survive the Q&A bit on _The Lightning Thief_ without making idiots out of themselves.

It's so much easier to breathe after that; they mingle together on the edges of the bigger, older crowds at the follow-up party, keeping shoulder to shoulder in case they get stopped for pictures. Up until Brandon announces, "All right, enough of this. I'm here to party! Woman, fetch me a drink!"

This last is said to Logan, who's already moving toward one of the wait staff before he realizes what was said to him, and by then Alex looks ready to piss herself laughing, so he brings Brandon a Cosmopolitan -- bright pink, with a rind of pineapple and an umbrella -- and hands it over with a completely straight face.

"Touche," says Brandon, and Alex has to lean on Logan's shoulder, laughing so hard she can't even make a noise.

A little bit later, he gets a text message from Nate, who's forgotten about the time zones. He tried to enter his name into Logan's phone as _Son of Poseidon, bitch_ except Logan had one of those old Razor flip phones, so it only fit the first few characters. Now he gets messages from the _Son of Posei_ and thinks it's absolutely hilarious and refuses to let Nate change it.

_Dubbed,_ reads the text, and Logan thinks it's supposed to read "dude," but Nate's phone can only auto-fill correctly so many times. Seriously, Nate has the worst spelling sense of anyone Logan's ever met. _Stop leaving your clothes everywhere. Nobody likes a sloppy boyfriend._

And he knows Nate's talking about his tendency to leave clothes all over the set: a sweatshirt tossed over the back of a chair for when they crank the air conditioning too high, a pair of fluffy socks to put on at lunch when the Greek sandals chafe after a third take, etc and so on, but out of context, it sounds like something else entirely. This he figures out when Alex leans over his shoulder, going, "Hey, what're you smiling about?" and catches sight of the text message before he can whip it out of her line of sight.

" _What_ about your boyfriend?" she half-shrieks, way too loud, making a instinctive swipe for his phone.

He slips it back into his pocket, going, "What -- I don't know what you're talking about," purposely coy, just to see the challenge flare in her expression and the way Brandon's eyebrows do a very spirited leap up his forehead.

For the rest of the night, they make increasingly unsubtle attempts to trick him into either telling them or giving up his phone, and when they fall into the limo to be taken back to their hotel, they've both come down to threatening him with blackmail on his _Facebook page,_ and Logan marvels at how they're in their mid- _twenties_ and he's seventeen and he's still, somehow, the maturest of the lot.

 

:.:.:.:

 

The sun is too bright on Percy's face, burning yellow-white coronas on the red undersides of his eyelids.

He blinks slowly, squinting and then turning his head so he's not staring directly up at the sky. It takes one moment, two, and then he jerks upright, casting a panicked look around. He's bloody and still covered in grave dirt from the Underworld, and he moves stiffly, listing a little to one side when he hauls himself to his feet, but none of this is important. At all.

"Annabeth!" he cries out, and there's an answering moan from further down the sidewalk.

He huffs out a quick breath, trying to stop it from becoming a gasp of relief. She's sitting on the curb, leaning back against a "No Parking" sign with her face lifted to the sun. She is soaked to the skin, long streaks of dark hair plastered all across her face. 

"Next time," she goes darkly, when he gingerly sits down next to her. "Could you maybe think to warn a girl before you drop half the Atlantic on her head?"

"Sorry," Percy goes, even though he's not, not really, because she opens her eyes then, and the smile that's fighting its way across her mouth makes the light in her eyes just _dance,_ and they sit there for a moment beaming dopily at each other.

"You did good," Annabeth offers, quiet, like it's costing her something.

Percy's grin is momentarily blinding, before he wrestles it back under control and tries to look like she doesn't affect him at all. "So does this mean I get your approval?"

She turns her body towards him, and there's something different about her smile now. "Yeah. Yeah, Seaweed Brain, I guess you do," she goes, her voice trailing off like she's forgetting how to speak.

She tilts her mouth up, and Percy knows an invitation when he sees it. He leans in, presses his sun-chapped lips to hers. She kisses him back, a brief fluttering of her mouth parting against his, and then it's suddenly less of a kiss and more of an argument, which is more their style anyway. He slides one hand into her hair and hooks the other one around her knee, pulling it astride his hips. She makes a noise low in her throat, settles more firmly into his lap, and kisses him harder.

And this, this is perfect. This makes everything worth it, just for this moment, Annabeth's arms curling around his neck and her skin cool to the touch.

Somewhere close-by, a cell phone goes off; Katy Perry blasts out recriminations about Vegas.

"Shit," goes someone. "Sorry!"

Alex pulls away from him with a noise like she's surfacing from somewhere deep, twisting her head to say with sarcastic incredulity, "Really? _Really,_ you guys? Your sense of timing _sucks."_

And suddenly Logan's back in his own skin, just a kid wearing fake blood and dress-up clothes, with a lapful of actress ten years his senior, and it leaves him dizzy and reeling a little bit, like he's stepping out of a theater into blinding sunlight and not really remembering which world he's in. He blinks rapidly, trying to reconcile place and time and who he is with who he's supposed to be.

There are people everywhere, milling off-set; Chris and Lynn and a couple folks from costuming and one sleepy-looking girl from make-up, plus Jake, whose phone it had been. He looks unrepentant.

Nate's the only one still watching Logan and Alex, a half-smile on his face, something a little sad and distant.

Logan's eyes catch on that smile, the faint hook of Nate's lips that he can see even in the off-stage shadow, and the feeling of disconnect gets even sharper as he stares, and Logan's not sure what he's looking at; this can't be the Nate Logan knows, because Nate doesn't go around looking ... looking _wistful,_ like he's _remembering_ this.

He thinks, unbidden, of the way Nate laughs when he's truly been startled by something, barking sharp like it's being torn out of him, exploding at the seams and the corners with laughter, and what it feels like to _make_ him laugh like that.

When they're ready to film again, Logan holds onto that feeling, and Percy is looking at Annabeth with admiration and hunger, like a man struck stupid, laid helpless and in love.

 

:.:.:.:

 

For all that he might have a bit of a gay crush on the grip that cheats death like it's in the answer key on the bottom of his cereal box, Logan thinks he's handling it pretty well. Sticks it in a little mental compartment and doesn't act weird about it -- which, frankly, any actor learns coming out of the metaphorical cradle.

"Licorice?" Nate offers, tilting a huge bag of Red Vines towards him when he settles in the dirt next to him in between shoots. It's one of those wood scenes with Uma Thurman again -- they're just waiting for her to show up. She's two hours late, but, hey. Nobody rushes Uma Thurman (first name, last name, because _legends,_ man.)

"Woah. Where'd this come from?" Logan goes, breaking off a long rope, because, oh hell, never let anyone say Logan Lerman won't take free candy.

Nate's grin is a brief sliver of white teeth. "My mom works in a candy shop in Manhattan. She sent me these."

"A candy shop, huh," Logan says, his voice unconsciously dropping into a 50 Cent lilt.

_Grow up,_ says Nate's expression. "Totally the best part of my childhood."

"I bet." It's a huge bag, he notes. "Your mom is _awesome."_

"Yeah, she is," Nate goes, with easy, open affection, and Logan would totally call him out on being a mama's boy, except his mouth is full of licorice and he's predisposed in Nate's mother's favor, whoever she is.

"I have a new fan site," he announces.

"Whoop-de-doo," Nate replies automatically. And then, "Another one?"

"Yup. This one posts a new picture of me every day," he says grandly.

"That's ... kind of creepy."

"Yeah, a bit," Logan shrugs, flashes him his photographer-friendly smile. "Welcome to Hollywood!"

"Be that as it may, but my fan site causes more wank than yours."

"You don't even have --"

Brandon chooses that exact moment to crop up behind them, still decked out in full Grover gear and carrying his sword in one hand. They stop talking instantly in order to look up at him, and he blinks back at them with the dawning expression of someone who's just awkwardly interrupted something.

"Sorry," he goes, after a beat that stretches too long. "Is this one of those generational gap things? Because 'wank' is a very curious word, and under normal circumstances I would be all over it, but I'm not sure you were using it in the context I think you were using it in. You young people are going to have to explain this to --" There's sudden loud crashing in the woods behind him, and he goes, "Oh, shit, it's Alex," and hustles his lurid green ass around them like it's been set on fire.

It's one of those cast in-jokes things. Somewhere along the line, after bumping each other one too many times with their props during the first few run throughs, their swords and shields had become synonymous with herpes -- i.e., "keep your goddamn herpes away from me!" and it just escalated from there, until even Chris was doing it ("Logan, your herpes is blocking the shot, do something about it!"): "excuse me," Alex says, materializing behind them and scrambling in between them. She chases Brandon in and out of the trees, waving her sword around and yelling something along the lines of, "you're going to take my herpes, bitch, and you're _going to like it,"_ and Brandon tries to duck back and around and gets full-on body tackled. Alex isn't big enough to actually knock him over, so they just kind of wrestle in place, shouting and cussing and generally being immature.

Logan, who by sheer knee-jerk reaction has his phone out and is totally making a video of this, glances sideways at Nate, who's watching them with something unidentifiable all over his face; not like he's watching two actors make idiots of themselves before a shoot, but like he's watching a couple friends and remembering something bright and warm and personal.

He calls out, "Come on, Annabeth, he's leaving his right side wide open! Hit him with your elbow!"

"Dude, shut up!" Brandon yelps, but it's too late: Alex delivers a swift jab and then their roles are reversed, and the audience their scuffle has attracted groans in sympathy.

And this is what it's like, Logan realizes with a feeling not unlike leaning out over a very large drop, watching the laughter light Nate up from the inside out, to be with someone who likes people for people, who cannot act to save his life, and to realize that out of the two, you're not the one you like best.

 

:.:.:.:

 

The next few days, Logan doesn't have to be on set at all -- they're doing a couple retakes of scenes that he, miraculously, doesn't appear in, and he has free time, which for this movie has been about as likely as him staying awake throughout the entire State of the Union address: which is to say, not at all.

He spends them doing absolutely fuck-all around his house, sending his brother stupid texts at the most awkward times and doing nothing more strenuous than heading downstairs to heat up some Pizza Rolls and then carrying them back to his room.

When his name shows up on call again, it's for one of the pool scenes: one of the very earliest shots in the whole movie, when he's nothing more complicated than a kid who might be kind of a freak for water but is otherwise unremarkable.

He gets there early, before even the make-up people -- who have to be part-bat considering they're _always there_ and don't seem to spend all the time he's in the chair yawning in his face like he does to them, seriously, someone should give those guys a medal -- and he blames it on all that inactivity after several months straight of 12-hour workdays: it's almost a relief to stand on the blue-tiled edge of the pool, right on top of the smooth enamel that says "6ft" like it's important that it's exactly where he stands, and slip into Percy's skin like it's the most worn and comfortable of jackets.

It's something a lot like peace, the slow fall forward, the water closing cold and sudden over his body as he disappears beneath the surface, wrapping him up and swallowing him down, and Logan doesn't know if that's him or if that's Percy -- he thinks they've gotten tangled inside of him, somewhere over the course of this production. Happiness stretches out underneath his skin in a filmy haze, warming him, down here where all the sounds of the outside world are muffled, indistinguishable from the beat of his own blood in his ears.

When he finally surfaces, the pool is still empty, spare for Nate, sitting cross-legged on the edge. He's got a towel tossed over his thighs, simply watching Logan artlessly shove his wet hair up his forehead and rub chlorine out of his eyes.

Logan or Percy, it's one of the two, nodding in the face of inevitability, and it seems like the absolute right course of action to kick over to Nate, hauling himself up out of the pool, water spreading out from underneath his swim trunks and dripping off his body, but Nate doesn't edge away, just hands him the towel, and Logan takes one look at his eyes, blue-green and bright like they've been highlighted by the sun, and feels breathless all over again.

Nate breaks silence first, going, "Cameras aren't even supposed to be here for another hour, you know."

Taking refuge by burying his face in the towel, Logan makes some vaguely affirmative noise. "It was either this or the gym, and I don't know about you, but I like the pool better."

"You actors and your preoccupation with having perfect bodies," Nate's tone is judgmental, but when he lifts his head, his mouth is quirked in that mocking smile.

"Hey," he says defensively. "You're not the one who has to be wet and half-naked in high-definition in front of the entire nation. And probably Brazil. Didn't you tell me once that Percy Jackson was really popular in Brazil?"

Nate's lips twitch, half-parted like he's going to retort, but Logan drops the towel into his lap, unconsciously straightening his back and running a hand down his abs -- he's no Taylor Lautner, but he doesn't think he's _bad_ to look at, and whatever Nate's going to say is lost in a sudden inhale, like his heart has tripped and took his lungs with it.

It draws Logan's attention as whip-crack-fast as a car wreck, and he finds Nate's eyes following the path of his hand, the irises suddenly storm-colored and his nostrils flared. The effect of this is immediate and visceral, and Logan stops breathing like it's no longer important, spreading his hand flat over his sternum.

It's crystal clear in his imagination, the picture it will make; Nate's fingers spreading over his bare skin, the rest of his body following, mouth slack with surprise and his hair messy and getting messier when he curls his fingers in it, drag him close, and Logan wants it so bad it feels like every cell in his body has been charged with it.

_Touch me,_ he thinks at him, like a playground dare, I'll do it if you do it first. Nate's eyes snap up to his like he can hear it, and Logan would never hold his gaze like a challenge, but he isn't Logan right now; he's half-Percy, too, and so he stares back. His mind flitters, shutter-fast, over every little detail about Nate's body; those damn eyes, his unmarked skin and crooked mouth and the lines of his fingers and it's ridiculous, how much Logan wants to slide across the wet tile, push himself up onto his knees and sling a leg over Nate's hips, kiss that mouth that says insulting things without a care, and it feels so much like drowning, and he's so in love it pulses inside of him like it's shadowing his heartbeat.

_Wait, what,_ goes some other part of his brain, suddenly paying attention.

And then, waking up to the tension that's cropped up, sudden and electric, _oh, shit. Oh shit. I am. I really am._

So Logan does the only logical thing he can do; he shoves Nate into the pool.

 

:.:.:.:

 

He's still thinking along these lines, unable to shake that breathless, weightless feeling, even weeks later, when _The Lightning Thief_ has officially moved into post-production and they celebrate with a trip to the national park, where they have a barbeque and everyone finally gets to meet the author's son, who -- if you believe Mr. Riordan's spiel about ADHD and dyslexia and how the books came to be -- is the real life Percy Jackson.

The afternoon has pretty much bled away, smearing the sky with yellows and oranges, and it finds him flat on his back on the bank of the lake, because he'd tried to wrestle Nate into a headlock. Apparently they teach grips kung-fu, because even though Logan got a crash-course in foam-sword-fighting and basic self-defense, he maybe gets a blow and a half on Nate before he finds himself flipped over the kid's shoulder into the mud. Which is uncomfortable, and awkward, and dude, _mud,_ seeping under the waistline of his shorts. That is never cool. And Nate is sitting on top of him, and Logan will never understand what it is about this bro that he _never gets wet._ Seriously.

He opens his mouth, intending to complain about this, and maybe also the fact that he is _on his back in the mud,_ but what comes out instead is, "You have very pretty eyes."

Nate blinks once. And twice. And then his lips give a wry quirk. "And I thought _I_ was strange and inbred," he remarks in tones of great wonder usually reserved for the kind of people who wind up on FailBlog.

And then they're kissing, like it's the natural progression from point A to point B: Nate leaning down, head crooked to the side and his tongue working deep and slow in Logan's mouth. Logan's fingers curl in the hair at the nape of his neck, tugging and bringing him closer, and somewhere in the distance, he can hear Uma Thurman going, " _No._ You are _not_ getting me in a paddleboat."

He takes a moment to pause and reflect on how incredibly _strange_ his life is, that he's listening to Uma shriek, " _Never!"_ and the pounding of feet on the dock as Rosario Dawson and Alexandra Daddario chase her down, and Pierce Brosnan yelling at them from a paddleboat in the middle of the lake, and that he's in the mud and the wet and the Percy part of him is wondering why he ever thought that was uncomfortable, not when he has Nate on top of him, except Nate is _snorting_ and --

"What the hell," he protests blankly when the kiss breaks off into Nate snickering.

"I'm sorry," says Nate, totally unapologetic and not even managing to be charming about it, and Logan likes him for this. Always has. "I think this now officially makes me narcissistic."

Strange and inbred, indeed. "Thank you for the revelation," he allows magnanimously, and tries to tug him close again. "You know, you owe me your real name, don't you? You remember: I do a great job doing Percy --" Nate's lips quirk and Logan revises mentally; great word choice when he has warm boy weight in his lap. "-- and you'd tell me your real name."

Nate looms closer, his skin warm and sun-soaked and stupidly dry. "I guess I do," he concedes, and bends to Logan's ear.

 

:.:.:.:

 

It takes five and a half minutes for Logan's brain to repair itself, which is long enough for Nate -- no, Percy, Percy Nathaniel Jackson what the flipping _shit_ \-- to shrug and go, "We could make out at the bottom of the lake. I can do that, you know."

"Oh, hell no," is Logan's immediate reply. "I am not taking your sloppy seconds of a romantic idea."

Percy flashes him a brilliant smile. "I knew you read the books," he says, triumphant, and reaches for him; Logan follows, complaining, and they meet in the middle.

 

 

-fin


End file.
